Phoenix Hawk Lore: Chapter 2
DropBear Su-eye-side
Allrekitz, Pug Q Prefecture
Milliseconds from Vancouver, Godlike Ping
15 July 3039 – exactly 12 minutes later
“No.”
Like so many in his fifth tier, he suckled at the teat of the Streamerz, poring over metamechs.com, lurking the forums for any bit of tactical advantage. He knew that the first thing he’d do when he took delivery of his p-hawks was to strip them and arm them properly. Arm them properly. Something about those last three words haunted him. Haunted? How could he be haunted by a phrase when nothing had yet happened? Was it foreboding? A premonition? He shook it off and dove into his mechlab, running through his newly gotten c-bills like inheritance money at WinStar.
“Yo!”
There was no choice in the forty-three-year-old-acting-as-an-eighteen-year-old’s mind as to which variant he’d run with first. ECM was the kind of tactical advantage he needed, knowing he’d be out there in an unmastered mech, slow and new. He recalled the Kodiak Massacres, so many dead bears. No amount of dakka could save those hitboxes. He relished it, playing
Hunting Bears by Radiohead on repeat for two weeks straight. But now he’d be the hunted. So 1B it would be, and a wise old streamer who had advance intel suggested, by way of another wise old pilot, that three ERLL was the way to go. This appealed to his sniping sensibilities and the build was built.
“Damn.”
Hoping beyond hope that his bunny ears would take zero damage like the Archer, he dropped, in an unknown mech, on an unknown map, with no usable intel to guide him (though the generals had promised him this would be fixed soon, he questioned his own sanity in making this drop). Blind in every way. The concentrating of three ERLL in the top right section of his mech felt right, like his Snipe Chicken days – the first mech he ever mastered. And as near as he could tell, this map was a sniper’s map if ever there was. He was surviving, which, at the end of the day, was all a tier five pug could ever hope for. He longed for a KDR of 1.00, but he wasn’t fooling himself, not today.
“Hi.”
He never stopped to think that there would be so many other boots and scrubs out there, such easy targets for him. But today, here, everyone was a scrub. Hugging a frozen corner of a long forgotten building, firing across the “punchbowl” pinging diehard mechs long since mastered, even with half damage at distance, they couldn’t touch him back. Not with his XL. Not with his ECM, and not with those sweet, sweet jumpjets. He began to gain confidence - which was always an alarm to him - that old copper taste in his mouth creeping up, the taste of worry before a prideful crash. The taste of him biting the inside of his cheek in subconscious fear of the unknown. Arm them properly. Still, he was loving this new mech.
“...”
The taste passed, and the game (d)evolved with lights soon realizing they could scamper from building to building unnoticed. How could he have forgotten about the resizing of the Locust? They were everywhere. The swarm was real. His pre-recorded calls for help returned to him in a twisted echo of “sorry” followed by unintelligible returns on the coms. He realized, that despite there still being five mechs alive, and only being outnumbered by one, that he was truly alone.
It was time to put the new ride through the paces, see what she can do, if for nothing else than to hear an upbeat guitar solo at the end of the round versus a slightly less optimistic one, the razor-thin sonic line that separates victory from defeat. Scrambling, jumping, evading and cooling when he could on top of buildings, praying for torso mounts from the enemy, he picked off an Oxide, which these days was nothing to brag about. Still, he thought to himself, I just killed a Jenner. But there was still work to do, he had to fall back to what was left of his group. What was he thinking veering off so far to snipe? Sure it was a great angle of attack. Sure it would harass and turn his enemies’ backs to the attacking force. But why did he think this time would be different? He recalled his thankless weeks of NARCing in his Raven, watching the lrms and damage points streak above him.
With one last push, he jumped from one building to the next, backwards, firing his long-ranged weapons at a deadly-close range in a panicky misuse of Inner Sphere technology… and then it happened. One solitary “alpha” – if you can call it such – from the near-imperceptible Pirate’s Bane that was following him blew his arm clean off. What? Already I’m down to one third of my attacking strength? How could my arm have fallen off so easily? I still have the one laser, I can take him. Where is h…
Time to earn that armor.
Edited by hypographia, 28 June 2016 - 02:24 PM.
4
RustyBolts, on 25 May 2016 - 12:48 PM, said:
